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Joseph S. Nye, Jr., a former US assistant secretary of defense and chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, is University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of
Is the American Century Over?

I must disagree with the conclusion of my fellow commentator below. The atrocities committed by ISIS & Co are nothing compared to the atrocities committed by the Syrian regime (over decades) against their own people and the neighbouring countries. Thus the relative acceptance that ISIS & Co are getting from the population, compared to the limited or no acceptance that the Syrian regime is getting. When interviewed, some migrants said that they were fleeing the bombs and the killing of the Syrian regime and not the barbarism of ISIS & Co. One should not forget the WMDs’ which the Syrian regime did not hesitate to use and was about to start WWIII. The Syrian regime is not an option.

If your end goal in Syria is stability – and that should be the key determinant across the Middle East – then the Assad regime should be supported. Before the rebellion began Syria was a peaceful, well ordered state where Islamic fundamentalists were kept under control. The Wests’ destructive drive to dictate democracy to states patently not ready for it has been disastrous right across the Middle East and has contributed significantly to our current immigration and terrorism crises. You cannot expect democracy to work in a country which does not have a history of peaceful dialogue between opposed parties and is wracked by armed factionalism. In a situation like this you need stability – which can only be provided by a non-democratic state which keeps the opposition under control. I have a less than favourable attitude towards the quasi socialist Baath party - however my concern is what would a post Assad Syria look like – even after the defeat of Daesh? My guess would be the current mess that is Libya – awash with arms, no central government and armed factions vying for power and even trying to secede from the state – basically a failed state with little hope of reconstruction. The obvious lesson is that democracy does not work in the Middle East. The reality is that even if a functioning democracy could be created in many countries of the Middle East the result could be many Iran like regimes which hate the West, sponsor terrorism and contribute to instability rather than a peaceful, stable regime which keeps Islamic fundamentalists under control. Our allies across the Middle East should be reassured that this abject lesson in what not to do should ensure support for their less than democratic regimes.
It is about time that the West realised the enemy in the Middle East is Islamic fundamentalism – especially Daesh – and not Assad. A Western approach of only targeting Daesh and over time rehabilitating Assad could work – as it did in the case of Gaddafi. Arming and training anti-Assad groups – even if they could find the personnel - could well end up like the Iraq fiasco where the groups disintegrate at the approach of Daesh leaving them their weaponry and equipment or as also happened just desert straight to Daesh. Bottom line is the West does not have a credible example of a recently reconstructed and stabilised country. Rehabilitation not reconstruction. Far better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

"Sunni" is very vague. Turkey with 80 million people and a NATO army is the natural great power. For centuries and centuries, even milennia, Constantiople controlled northern "Iraq" (The Tigris and Euphrate was under a single power for the first time in 1921, not even in Mesopotamian times) and the Persians the South.

That is what created the Sunni-Shiite division. Iran has now taken the Persian half. Now is the time to give Turkey any kind of protectorate it wants in the northern, asking only a bit of decorum with the Kurds in their limited current state.

When you say ... " the soldiers who wear them should be Sunni Arabs " ... did you forget when Bu$h invaded Iraq they purposefully humiliated the entire Iraqi Army which was almost entirely Sunni. And to add insult yo injury, they placed the Shiite's in the driver's seat who further humiliated them.

So now you're saying it's the Sunni's responsibility to clean up the mess created by Bu$h ??

I suspect, ISIS running amok creating terror and upheavals is a fitting rewards for the humiliation the Sunni's has suffered.

And the irony of it all is the Shia. who were allowed to govern. contrary to the wisdom of Gertrude Bell, doesn't have the fortitude nor the will to do their duty ... which why Bell placed Sunni's at the helm of governing the newly created Iraq.

And finally, welcome to the Arab Spring. As Putin warned, it was not going to be what the west expected. You've unleashed the hounds of war by throwing them the dictators that kept them in check.

Perhaps someone will finally have the courage to demand Bu$h and Cheney explain why it was so important to invade Iraq seeing how the invasion was the birth of what we're experiencing today.

This article doesn't seem to say what incentives Sunni Arabs would have for fighting ISIS, which is attractive to Sunni Arabs who are disgruntled with the Shi'a government in Iraq. Also, our Sunni ally, Turkey, for complex reasons, has renewed fighting with the Kurds, who were the most effective force on the ground, but who may now be disgruntled with us. Most of the current high ranking officials and military officers in ISIS were officers in Saddam's army, and not only were humiliatingly disbanded, many were thrown into prison. It's hard to imagine how their tribes and clans in Iraq would be enticed to fight against ISIS. Finally, has anything yet been done to stop the flow of money from Saudi Arabia, Dubai, and Qatar to ISIS? Saudi Arabia, of course, is currently fighting against the faction in Yemen which previously was the main opponent of Al Qaeda In The Arabian Peninsula, for reasons which are not obvious.

It seems to be pretty well established, even by the Republican political establishment, that the Iraq war of the G.W. Bush administration was an unnecessary disaster, perhaps even criminal. But it is excessive in the extreme, I think, to imagine that that war is the root cause of all the Middle East's many excesses and failures. Why do you choose to ignore the Iran-Iraq war, for example, in your analysis? Or regional demographics? Or the role of sectarian violence in Islam that predates even the first European settlement in what, two centuries later, would become the United States?

The one certainty, in my view, is that stability in the Middle East will not be realized until the states in the region begin to accept at least some degree of culpability for their own current difficulties.

"...US foreign policy toward the Middle East will have to develop a higher level of sophistication than the current debate reveals. " Yeah right, there's tons of evidence to show that's going to happen!

" ... the recent nuclear agreement may open opportunities for greater flexibility. To seize them, however, US foreign policy toward the Middle East will have to develop a higher level of sophistication than the current debate reveals." It is refreshing to see a frank acknowledgment of the lack of intellectual sophistication that has shaped US policy in the Middle East and Persian Gulf. American diplomatic credibility within the region has been damaged since the Reagan administration. Serious thought, rather than cheap rhetoric and military bumbling, will be required moving forward.

Again, ignore the elephant in the room -no one wants to hear it anyway?
Whatever strategy we have used since 911, do we have more or less people who hate us?
The root cause of "terrorism" is the divide of haves and havenots. Why would anyone give up his/her life for any cause? He/she has nothing to lose. (There is always a few exceptions - the radicals.)
The birth lottery is not working well.

I think that the key to success is the example of Turkey in the 1920s under Ataturk, I mean the idea of secular state in the Islamic country.That's mean, that the state's in the region have to concentrate on national ideas like patriotism,traditions,language.Of course that isn't the best way but people will be concentrated on intern problem's and will find them self as one nation.

I think that U.S. is till secular state of course religion and especially Christianity is a big part of american culture but it isn't the same thing as radical Islam. Unfortunately I'm not following the debates in America because I'm not live in the US.
Generally I'm talking about the approach to the solution of problems in the region.I think this approach will be supported by Turkey, Egypt and will be acceptable for USA and Russia

Have you paid attention to the political discussion in the US lately? The republican base, mainly christians, are demanding the bible be placed above the rule of law ... clearly they're denouncing secularism.

Hi, Joe, from your Princeton classmate, long a resident of Germany. From our view, recruiting by the internet needs to be all but closed down & the refugee situation brought under control. Yet there can be no Western boots on the ground, as this just incites. Turkey is becoming an issue, with Kurds on both sides of its border with Iraq considered a threat.

The best I can suggest is a greater effort on in- ducing a Shia-Sunni "team" government in Bag- dad. Step by step....

The length of the Catholic-Protestant conflict in Europe is indeed instructive. However, just as the Swedes came in to settle things, & America entered WWI, we must seek some new input to help stop the conflicts. Like Obama, I really don't want that to be a nuclear exchange between, say, Iran & Israel.

The US purposefully humiliated the Sunni's and once the Shia's were running the government, they continued. Gertrude Bell indicated this would happen if Shia's were ever giving control over the government. That's why she pushed for the Sunni's, a distinct minority, to run the government. They had a sense of sensibility and would do their duty, which Shia's demonstrated they both couldn't and wouldn't.

Right, for multiple reasons. During WWII, many French people fought under the "Forces Françaises Libres" (Free French Forces), which the UK helped form the beginning. Why is the idea of creating Free Syrian Fores not even considered at the moment?

A pretty accurate analysis by Prof Nye. Putting US boots in Syria is necessary but is going to strengthen ISIS. Turkey has the capacity but not the resources to take out Assad nor ISIS. Saudi Arabia is incapable of fighting any kind of war.
However the best strategy would be to side with the lesser evil, Assad. ISIS. I abhor Assad but realistically he is the only hope for a stable Syria.

Putin will never let go of Syria (Russia has a military presence there for ages) and he doesn’t give a D*** about Assad. The US will never let go of Israel and Obama doesn’t give a D*** about Bibi. The Ayatollahs of Iran will never let go of Iraq and they don’t care about the leadership there. As for ISIS & Co, they are using and have at their disposal the most powerful weapon of all; it is called “Religion” or the “Power of “Islam” as they call it.

There is a lot of wishful thinking here by Nye. Putin has already dismantled his think-piece by sending Russian military planes and armed forces to sustain Assad's regime. At least Putin is trying to retain the territorial sanctity of Syria in spite of CIA financed/equipped Sunni opposition.
Where will this tragic Syrian affair end?

Thank you for a thoughtful article. I wonder, though, if any case can be made for NOT fighting the Islamic state and their aspirations, but rather letting the misery of a theocratic caliphate run its course?

Is there really any fundamental difference between a public beheading in Syria and a public hanging in Iran? Will ISIS continue to destroy its heritage once it finds itself tasked with keeping the garbage collected and the sewers working? Will killing large numbers of ISIS terrorists and political ideologists, bastards that they are, really put a dent in the continuation of the basic attitudes that bring ISIS into being in the Middle East in the first place?

B.H. Liddell Hart, in the aftermath of the carnage of WW1 argued for the strategy of the "indirect approach." I wonder if that advice wouldn't be worth considering here?

The best way to fight ISIS, is to avoid creating such terrorist groups in the first place. As evident in the highly respected PBS programs related to ISIS and How the US lost Iraq, there is clear and ample evidence that ISIS is the outcome of US military action in the Middle East.

As well, the entire Arab Spring initiative, which has been aided and abetted by the US and NATO, has resulted in relatively benign dictatorships being turned into terrorist states (like Libya). The current war in Syria could also lead to the development of a further terrorist state, should the Assad government deposed. The best way to stop terrorism is to stop war. The US history of winning guerilla styled wars has been abysmal.

It is time to cut the losses and get back to what America does best, and that is to set an example for the rest of the world as to how a nation can contribute to the betterment of society, rather than bomb other nations into submission.

I used to be America's greatest proponent. I long for the America I once knew and admired. As President Eisenhower said in 1961, beware of the time when the American military/industrial complex gains control.

US foreign policy isn't made any easier by the rabid partisanship at home. In particular, Republican preference for frustrating Obama's policies over uniting to serve the national interest bodes no good.

I think the Russians, Syrians, & Iranians already have a plan to push ISIS out of Syria and backbinto Iraq where the remnants of Saddam's military ana Al Qaida of Iraq came from...phase II would follow. The U.S., under Mr. Obama, failed to counter the neighboring influence of Saudi Arabia and Iran that caused a breakdown of Sunni/Shia cooperation in Iraq. We got rid of the tyrant Saddam only to have the failure of Mr. Obama's foreign policy cause a wirse situation.
If the U.S. somehow managed to take out al Baghdadi as they did bin Laden, the Caliph of the Caliphate would no longer inspire the ungodly cutthroats who follow him. Iranian coordination throughout Iran, Iraq, and Syria will eventually cause more problems to Israel and other countries in the region.

Joseph S. Nye may have a good strategy to fight or contain ISIS, which is posing a grave threat to global security. He is right about the sad reality that a military defeat of ISIS alone will not be the end of political turmoil in the region, and that "we should be prepared for a similar Sunni extremist group to rise from the ashes".
As long as there is no stability in the Middle East, jihadists will find breeding ground for terrorism. They have already gained a foothold in Iraq, Syria and Libya, and the fight against them is a long haul that requires more than just air strikes to succeed. Obama's reluctance to put American boots on the ground is unsurprising, because he fears that it would turn out to be another mission creep. In fact any deployment of "foreign or Shia tropps" would enhance "the Islamic State’s soft power", confirming its "claim of being surrounded and challenged by infidels" and strengthening "its global recruiting efforts".
Nye says the Sunni Arabs and Turks should be fighting ISIS on the ground. So far the Kurdish forces, who are Sunnis, have been Washington's sole reliable ally in the region. The Iraqi army is in disarray and the Shia-led government under Haider al-Abadi is weak and feckless. His predecessor, Nouri al-Maliki was hugely responsible for alienating the Sunnis and former loyalists of Saddam Hussein. Without the help of these disgruntled generals and technocrats ISIS wouldn't have come so far.
The question is how willing the Sunni Arabs and Turks are to eradicate ISIS. The Sunni Arabs see an assertive Iran and the rebellious Shiites within Saudi Arabia and beyond as their greater enemies. The Turks believe the Kurdish dream of autonomy poses a more imminent threat to their territorial integrity. For a long time Turkey had baulked at targeting the jihadists. Recently it had succumbed to Washington's request. Yet it has also started to launch air strikes against the Kurdish PKK. This "no-fly zone" that Erdogan so eager to set up as a safe haven for Syrian refugees serves to thwart the Syrian Kurds' ambition to gain autonomy as they would lose a chunk of their territory.
The dream of changing the "tenuous post-colonial boundaries" inspires ISIS to create its caliphate. The "arrested modernization" is a tool of the political elite to keep ordinary citizens ignorant. Religion is another tool to impede social, economic progress and stoke sectarian violence. The “Arab Spring” was a short-lived revolution and the turmoil in the region has been "exacerbated by the interstate rivalry between Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Shia-ruled Iran".
Given the fluid situation in the Middle East, Nye sees little room for consistent policies, and the US has to adopt more flexibility to "develop a higher level of sophistication" in dealing with the two regional players - Iran and Saudi Arabia - that see each other as arch enemies. As both have a stake in the stability there, the US should bring them together to resolve their differences.

The whole world knows who created “Daesh” and for what purpose, enough of this non sense. There is even a photograph of J. Mc Cain hugging their leader (Al Baghdadi) at the beginning of the Syrian crisis. To obliterate ISIS, one needs to obliterate Assad and if that happens BiBi shall be next in line. A vicious circle.

Let me detail it out further, since it's not right to just insult someone for not succeeding,

The principle that, in any given place, foreign warriors and authority figures automatically have much less "legitimacy" - this principle is quite right. If the US were to attack IS on their home turf, it would be almost as stupid as attacking Iraq was 15 years ago. But when IS invades the Shiite parts of Iraq, the roles are reversed. When IS invades Kurdistan, the roles are reversed. And when IS invades the core parts of Syria, the roles are reversed.

Secondly, the US diplomatic corps is, in all reality, going to be involved in whatever the outcome of the situation. They should be the audience for these endless discussions. Once again, good people, just put together into a "whole" which less than the sum of its parts. The blinders are going to have to come off.

When weighing the existence of regimes we don't like, it has to be balanced against the spread of violent extremism, the long-term damage to our reputation, and another thing I think should be a priority: laying the groundwork to meet the eventual need, maybe 10 or 20 or 30 years form now, to resuscitate the concept of "rule of law".

It seems that if IS were to attack the US, Joseph Nye would have us surrender and not fight them, until Sunni troops from Turkey and Saudi Arabia came to our rescue?? Wow. Sounds like the well of excuses for his oh-so-successful middle-east policy is running dry.

But there is a much more important issue here. That is the underlying assumption that U.S. diplomacy is able to help.

In the last 15 years, we built up a substantial track record of diplomacy before and after and during regime changes, and the results are in. Chaos and ultra-violent extremists are the result every time. Our diplomats are not simply good at midwifing new governments that have even the tiniest shred of redeeming value.

We are a great nation, good at many things. Our diplomats are good, honest, hard-working people. Maybe because of cultural reasons, maybe because of lack of feedback, maybe because of conflicted incentives, we have not yet mastered the art of handling this kind of situation. We should recognize our limitations.

If we care about a country, or about a group of suffering people, we should keep our diplomats as far away as possible.

The whole point about the difficulty of destroying Daesh is that because they are Sunni, no Sunni state is going to take the step of trying to defeat them militarily. That includes Turkey. It also includes all the gulf oil states .

The only people who have provided effective ground troops are Iranian and Iraqi Shia militias and Kurdish Sunnis, the Kurds have a very soft and attractive version of Islam, and don't want to lose a lot of their territory in the North of Iraq to Daesh. The Turkish reaction to brave Kurdish attacks on Daesh has been to cynically bomb the Kurds both in Iraq and in South Eastern Turkey.

Daesh is a strong Sunni extremist organization, and no Sunni states will attack it. So we are left either supporting the Shia, or supporting the Kurds. At present the West seems very reluctant to do either.

Professor Nye hits the Syrian strategic nail on the head when he says, 'The US diplomatic task is to persuade Assad’s supporters, Russia and Iran, to remove him without dismantling the remains of the Syrian state structure. " He goes on to suggest elements of possible US policy-measures needed to attain this difficult objective.

As recent US and allied efforts in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya have demonstrated, taking down the heads of authoritarian states is relatively straightforward for the sophisticated, hard-power-based, US military capability and capacity. However, what then happens is less clear from these three instances. If the US/NATO/ISAF proved incapable of restoring a semblance of domestic order in any of these three former states years after invading or intervening in these, then there is limited ground for confidence that a politically decapitated Damascus would be the centre of a reinvigorated and reunified Syrian dispensation anytime soon.

Without taking anything away from the essence of Professor Nye's powerfully articulated argument, it may be reasonable to suggest that on the basis of recent experience, bulls can destroy China far more easily than they can reconstruct it. Power - hard, soft or smart, in various combinations - has been unable to change that reality in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. Why should Syria prove different?

Oh please, it is all about them money. A war with ISIS is being engineered by those with a financial interest in it - in the press and on the ground in Syria etc. Are you sure this article is not a paid for part of that effort? Not that I mind much - ISIS probably need a good smack.

As Joseph Nye points out, the battle field of this war is not only on the ground, but to a large extent in the media. I would go further and claim that people´s minds are the main battlefield here. And to effectively fight this battle, “foot on the ground” in not enough. We all need to see why large swathes of young people support IS. What identity problems they have and what the rest of us can do to help. My understanding is that these people do not espouse the liberal capitalistic values that the West offers, and the only alternative they are offered is the radical Islam. Indeed, the Western liberal model is getting increasingly criticized from other corners as well, as it appears increasingly unsustainable -economically, socially and environmentally. There is a clear need to find a new way of organizing our societies and economies. It is tragic that such radicals as IS use this dissatisfaction of people to wage wars. This only raises the urgency for developing alternative solutions to the unsatisfactory current system, otherwise radicals will manipulate people to serve their ghastly goals. Another, more immediate solution, lies in the media field. Islam itself does not contain appeals to war. It is a manipulation that IS does. Muslims should start a massive informational campaign to encourage everyone to read Koran and to not rely on distorted interpretations offered by IS.